The Scenario:  The agency boss walks in, tosses you a USB drive and says, "I took some pictures during my vacation. Put one in this new ad for Dry Gulch Spring Water. The ad copy and the photos are on the drive. Oh, and it needs to be to the newspaper in 2 hours. Not a problem, right?"  He turns and disappears in a vapor -trail. You've seen the boss' skills with a camera. You hold your breath and say a little prayer as you insert the drive in the slot, hoping you get something, anything, usable.

All you can think is: 
Bad Photos + Missed Deadline  + Missed Ad Revenue = Boss searching CareerBuilder.com for your replacement.

Dealing with photos in a hectic production environment can often emphasize the need for speed. You can spend 15 minutes or more tweaking a picture in Photoshop, but the right plug-in can dramatically shorten that precious time. Alien Skin's Bokeh plug-in is a valuable bullet to keep in your Photoshop gun when the time comes. It allows you to vignette and create blurs around areas in a photo to draw the focus of the viewer where you want it in within the frame. It also creates great depth-of-field effects in just a few clicks.

I started with this photo which has practically everything in focus. It's a nice picture, but I'd like the focus to be on the big formation on the left, and not on the big rock in the foreground. I could crop the rock out of the photo, but I don't want to lose half of the photo. I could spend an hour clone-stamping the rock out of the foreground. But an easier and faster solution is to create a depth-of-field effect to place the focus where I want it.

Bokeh loads itself into Photoshop's pull-down "Filter" menu for easy access. As you can see, there are a slew of effects to choose from to get the effect you want.

Opening one of the folders reveals a big selection of lenses to set specific effect parameters. Experienced photographers will really appreciate this feature. In a manner of speaking, it allows you to re-shoot with some industry benchmark lenses.

Clicking the middle tab in the window reveals the parameter controls for the amount of blur, the shape of the diaphragm, and allows you to control the brightness of the highlights in the blur. This palette also lets you choose between a radial blur or a linear blur pattern.  This photo shows the radial pattern selected but, I want to use the linear selection for this exercise.

Here you see the linear control handles over the photo which allow you to place the start and end points for the blur. I'll make the rock in the foreground appear out of focus similar to how a long lens or low light situation might affect the focus.

This is a split screen comparison with and without the Bokeh blur effect with a little vignette effect added to darken the corners.

Here is the finished photo. Notice how the mesa on the left is now the focus of the overall photo instead of the big rock in the foreground. Yes, I could've done this with Photoshop by itself but, this effect took all of 90 seconds to set up, adjust and render in Alien Skin Bokeh.

As plug-ins go, Bokeh isn't cheap at $199. You'll have to decide whether the increase in workflow speed is worth the expense. But Bokeh is an easy-to-use, quick-to-learn plug-in that performs like a champ. The next time you've got a tight deadline and need to perform a little photo magic, you'll be glad to have Bokeh in your arsenal.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got an ad to get out to the newspaper.  :-)